This dissertation investigates the symbolic presence of medieval forms of textual selfhood in early modern English Petrarchan poetry. Undertaking a systematic re-reading of a significant body of English Petrarchism through the prism of late medieval English poetry, it argues that medieval poetic texts inscribe in the vernacular literary imaginary (i.e. a repository of discursive forms and identities available to early modern writers through antecedent and contemporaneous literary utterances) a network of recognizable and iterable discursive structures and associated subject positions; and that various linguistic and ideological traces of these medieval discourses and selves can be discovered in early modern English Petrarchism. Each of the four chapters traces medieval genealogies of a distinct scenario of subjectivity deployed by English Renaissance Petrarchism. The first chapter considers the significance of William Langland???s poetics of meed (reward) for the anti-laureate and anti-courtly identities assumed by Thomas Wyatt in his Petrarchan poems and by Edmund Spenser in the Amoretti. The second chapter examines the persistence of vernacular melancholy (encapsulated in Geoffrey Chaucer???s Book of the Duchess) in the verse of Henry Howard, earl of Surrey and in Philip Sidney???s Astrophil and Stella. The poetics of melancholy engenders a fragmented subjectivity that manifests itself through a series of quasi-theatrical performances of identity, as well as an ambivalent form of poetic discourse in which the production of Petrarchism is carried out alongside its radical critique. The focus of chapter three is the master trope of royal incarceration and its function as a mechanism of subject formation in the poetry of James I Stewart, Charles of Orleans, Mary Stewart, and Lady Mary Wroth. As the dissertation argues, the figure of an imprisoned sovereign is a crucial ideologeme of the pre-modern English political and literary imaginary, underwriting the poetics and politics of royal identity from Sir John Fortescue to James VI/I. Lastly, the fourth chapter investigates medieval genealogies of the subject afflicted with a malady of desire in Shakespeare???s sonnets, by tracing its inchoate vernacular precedents back to the poems of Thomas Hoccleve (La Male Regle) and Robert Henryson (The Testament of Cresseid).

The objective of the present study is to investigate the historical development of negative constructions in ME verse and to provide a descriptive account of it. The central issues analyzed in this thesis are: (1) the usage of the negative adverbs 'ne', 'not' and some other negative elements such as 'never', 'no', etc.; (2) the occurrence of negative contraction as illustrated by 'nam' (< ne am) and 'nolde' (< ne wolde); and (3) the development and the decline of multiple negation. The thesis has both a chronological and a geographical perspective, since it examines changes in usage which took place during the ME period and various dialectal types. The thesis also includes a discussion of pleonastic negation and the omission of negative elements (termed 'unexpressed negation'). For the purpose of these analyses, twenty manuscripts of eighteen verse texts ranging chronologically from early ME to later ME are selected from various geographical areas of England. The texts investigated are: (1) Poema Morale, (2) The Owl and the Nightingale, (3) King Horn, (4) Havelok, (5) The South English Legendary, (6) English Metrical Homilies, (7) The Middle English Genesis and Exodus, (8) The Poems of William of Shoreham, (8) Cursor Mundi, (10) Sir Ferumbras, (11) Confessio Amantis, (12) Handlyng Synne, (13) Kyng Alisaunder, (14) Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, (15) The Affiterative Morte Arthure, (16) Alexander and Dindimus, (17) The Destruction of Troy, and (18) The Stanzaic Morte Arthur. Due to the paucity of suitable material for linguistic analysis at the beginning of the ME period, Poema Morale is investigated in three selected manuscripts (MS Lambeth, MS Trinity, and MS Digby), all of which are localized in different areas of England.

No description available.

Bisherige Auswertungen der Erosionsgefährdung stützen sich auf das landesweit verfügbare Digitale Geländemodell (DGM) mit einer Rasterweite von 20 m (DGM20). Das neu erstellte DGM2 bietet durch seine Rasterweite von 2 m erstmalig eine sehr hohe räumliche Auflösung. In Testgebieten wurden die Auswirkungen der neuen Datengrundlage DGM2 (Laserscanbefliegung) auf die Erosionsgefährdungsbewertung analysiert. Verschiedene DGM-Aufbereitungsverfahren sowie DGM-Rasterweiten wurden im Hinblick auf die Erosionsmodelle Erosion-3D und ABAG (Allgemeine Bodenabtragsgleichung) getestet. ABAG und Erosion-3D reagierten zum Teil unterschiedlich empfindlich auf die verschiedenen DGM-Varianten.

No description available.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Boston University

This thesis investigates how Old English poets understood the processes of signification and interpretation through analysis of depictions of poor interpreters and the use of 'sign terms' such as tacen and beacen in the longer Old English poems. The first chapter deals with the Beowulf Manuscript, the second and third chapters consider Elene and Andreas within the network of related poems found in the Vercelli Book and the begin- ning of the Exeter Book, the fourth chapter is on the Junius Manuscript, and the conclusion looks at the use of the 'bright sign' motif across all four major poetic codices. I suggest that there is a 'heroic sign-bearing interpreter' character-type which several of the poems utilize or ironically invert, and that poor interpretation is nearly always asso- ciated with hesitation, which often resembles acedia. I also argue that there is greater nuance in the poems' depictions of modes of understanding than has previously been acknowledged: Eve in Genesis B does not stand for the senses which subvert the mind, but rather models the limits of rational thought as a means of understanding God, and Elene does not depict a simple opposition of letter and spirit, but a threefold mental pro- cess of learning about the Cross with analogues in exegesis and Augustine's Trinity of the Soul. Finally, I argue that there is a 'bright sign' motif which functions within a brightness-sign-covenant concept cluster, whose evocation as a traditional poetic unit is not identical to the denotation and connotation of its constituent parts. These strands of inquiry taken together demonstrate how Old English poems invest signs with significance by tapping into a specifically poetic network of allusion.

No description available.

This thesis traces the afterlife of the Romance of the Rose in fourteenth-century England. Whether it was closely imitated or only faintly recalled, I argue that the Rose exercised its influence on fourteenth-century English literature in two principal ways. Firstly, in the development of a self-reflexive focus on how meaning is produced and transmitted. Secondly, in a concern with how far the author's intentions can be recovered from a work, and to what extent the author must claim some responsibility for the meaning of a text after its release into the world of readers. In the Rose, many of these issues are presented through the lens of a disordered erotic desire, and questions of licit and illicit textual and sexual pleasures loom large in the later responses. My investigation focuses on four English writers: William Langland, John Gower, the Gawain-Poet, and Geoffrey Chaucer. In my final chapter I suggest that the Rose ceased to be a generative force in English literature in the fifteenth century, and I try to offer some explanations as to why. In examining the influence of the Rose in England I am not trying to suggest a linear transmission of cultural dominance, but rather a complex and plural process of interaction that expands to include texts that both antedate and post-date the Rose - especially Neoplatonic allegories and Ovid, on the one hand, and, on the other, Deguileville and Machaut. The individual English writers I look at are not seen as having a single and stable attitude towards the Rose; instead, I argue, the Rose emerges as a way of thinking about the interaction between texts, how meaning is produced, and how authorial ownership is claimed or refused. Using not only literary evidence but also detailed archival research into the manuscript circulation of the Rose, I question the usefulness of 'English' and 'French' as critical categories for the study of late-medieval literature, and attempt to show that, for a certain kind of literary activity, the Rose occupied a central position in England: not a stable foundation of cultural authority, but a realm of self-questioning subversion and instability.

This thesis considers time and narrative play in dream poems and framed narratives. It begins with a chapter on the history of time perceptions and time-telling, and explores how ideas about time influenced medieval writers. It also surveys some modern views on the history of time-measurement a nd its influences on culture and the collective consciousness. Chapter two, after analysing the treatment of time in the Roman de la Rose, surveys some of the ways in which modern criticism has evaluated and conceived the genre of secular dream literature that developed from the Roman de la Rose. Chapter three examines the innovative use of the convention of beginning a poem with a seasonal opening and theorises that this becomes a `language' open to adaptation and variation. Chapter four looks in detail at Froissart's L`Orloge amoureus and discusses the clock as a new object which, contrary to the views of cultural historians, was embraced by medieval writers, religious and secular, to symbolise a range of virtues, qualities and ideas. I argue that the clock inspired creativity rather than heralding a rationalisation of the mind that would stifle imaginative responses to this new technology. Chapter five explores metafictional and self-reflexive devices in Froissart's Joli Buisson de Jonece and Chaucer's House of Fame. I consider how these texts play with narrative time and sequence by writing the genesis of the text into the poem. Finally, chapter six examines ideas of closure in medieval dream poetry and looks specifically at the reciprocity and inconclusiveness of the Judgement poems of Guillaume de Machaut. Because the second poem reverses the decision of the first poem, it brings into question the authority of the text and the unity of the authorial voice.